1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to drug discrimination, and more specifically to automated inspection of pharmaceuticals to verify formulation, dosage, and physical conditions during an automated dispensing process in a retail distribution environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
The current mode of operation for many pharmacies is that pharmaceuticals must be manually loaded into an automated dispensing system, which is then used to dispense individual prescriptions. Because humans are involved, it is possible to load the wrong drug into the wrong automated dispenser. It is also possible to dispense a drug into the wrong vial or bottle, depending on the type of automation used. As a result, most states require a pharmacist or someone working under the supervision of a pharmacist to be involved to provide the necessary verifications at some point in the process. Most retailers are busy enough that multiple people are required to handle the volume of prescriptions that are filled in a typical day. Thus, these verifications are both time-consuming and costly, requiring the time of pharmacists that could be better used elsewhere in the pharmacy environment. In addition, pharmacies also face problems with the possibility of pharmaceutical tampering and the production of counterfeit drugs that can be accidentally allowed to enter the distribution stream. Thus, pharmacies need a verification process that can also reliably detect these counterfeit drugs and prevent their entry into the market.
Rather than involving humans extensively in the verification process, it would be useful to have an additional high quality check in the pharmacy workflow, thereby further decreasing the possibility of an incorrect drug being dispensed. Currently, technology is available for automated inspection of pharmaceuticals after the pills have been placed into the vial for distribution. However, the data collected commonly examines only a single pill or pills in the top layer of pharmaceuticals dispensed into the vial, thus missing the entire collection of pills below the top layer. While the data collected may be reliable, only a small portion of the dispensed drug has actually been considered and verified. Current methods do not allow assessment of each pill dispensed without disrupting the prescription fulfillment process.
Furthermore, some technologies require that the pills be positioned in a particular orientation to the sensor for the measurements to be taken, thus making it difficult to reliably get accurate measurements of the pharmaceutical dispensed. Therefore, technologies used today for pharmaceutical verification include a number of drawbacks with regard to the types of data collected, the percentage of dispensed pills that are analyzed, the reliability of the measurements taken, and a number of other areas.